The Silver Kings (27 page)

The Crowntaker was awake again too. He spent most of his time fishing, or so Tuuran told her, and didn’t say much. The Black Moon seemed to be gone, but the pain in Tuuran’s face told her that something was still terribly wrong.

‘He raves,’ Myst whispered. ‘He wanders in a daze.’

‘It’s like he’s not really there,’ said Onyx.

Zafir held them tight. When she asked Diamond Eye before they flew again, the dragon seemed not to know.
The Black Moon is still inside him. But dormant or dead even I cannot tell. Nor do I much desire to look.

On the third flight she passed a pod of whales a hundred miles from the eyrie. Diamond Eye threw himself at them and almost drowned her snatching one out of the water. A small one. He ­carried it back to the eyrie and set it on the rim, where the dragons ripped it to shreds and left only bones. Zafir had him catch a second and leave it in the yard. Food enough for the days she was gone; and then off again. This time exhaustion took her long before Diamond Eye returned, and Tuuran had to pull her unconscious from her dragon’s back because no one else dared come close. He carried her across the dragon yard and sat with her until Myst and Onyx shooed him away, and he was sitting beside her again when she woke. Her eyes slowly focused on his face. She reached out to touch his cheek. He looked distraught.

‘You went too far, Holiness.’

She sat up, reeled a little as her head spun for a moment, then grabbed his face in both hands and pulled him to her. She kissed him, awash with unexpected feeling, then let go and wondered what she was doing. She slumped and closed her eyes.

‘No, I didn’t,’ she murmured. ‘I found land.’

18

Red Lin Feyn

Thirteen months before landfall

‘Welcome. We are honoured to have a former Arbiter aboard.’ Captain Beccerr of the
Servant on Ice
bowed in front of Red Lin Feyn, low enough that the long braids of her hair touched the deck. Lin Feyn smiled uncertainly and looked about her. Sail-slaves were hauling in her sea chests and carrying them below. There were men busy in the rigging. The ship was preparing to sail. ‘Our expedition is one of reconnaissance, but we will be in what have become hostile waters so—’

‘I am aware, Captain. Thank you for your hospitality. I would see to my cabin.’

Captain Beccerr led her into the stern castle, then waited as Lin Feyn shooed away the sail-slaves and set about unpacking her chests herself. The Taiytakei still traded freely at Helhex in the south of Aria, but had been evicted from Deephaven in the north and restricted to a handful of ships each month. The necropolis still stood in the heart of that city, and now the Ice Witch had built a colossal black fortress further up the coast. Raised it on her own from raw stone in a single night, they said. Whispers spoke of a civil war brewing in Aria, one that the enemies of the Ice Witch were hardly likely to win without some help, and so help they would get. The legions of the Sun King would cross the seas in holy war, carried by the Taiytakei, to put an end to the Ice Witch for ever. The sea lords of Khalishtor had decreed it would be so. Lin Feyn had her doubts, but she kept them to herself, and the Crown of the Sea Lords had not sought her opinion. Captain Beccerr clearly had her doubts too, but
someone
had to go and see what the Ice Witch was building up there.

‘Uneasy times.’

Red Lin Feyn nodded. Baros Tsen and his eyrie and his dragons were gone, but the hatchling from the Queverra was still un­accounted for, the Statue Plague still rampant among the slaves in Cashax and now in Khalishtor too, the cracked pillar still in the cage around the storm-dark of the Godspike.

‘This war will either save us or plunge us into irrevocable catastrophe,’ she said. ‘And I don’t believe any of us have the first idea which it will be.’

When Captain Beccerr was gone, Lin Feyn opened the false bottom of her chest. She took out her copy of the forbidden Rava and opened it. Damned book was a mishmash of myths, of stories and obscure symbolism all muddled together with no rhyme or reason she could fathom. She couldn’t understand why the Elemental Men were so afraid of it. Everyone, for example, knew the tales of how the first men were made: the Rava simply said the same in a more obscure way.

‘… and the four creators tore pieces of their essence and spread them; and the sparks of the sun fell like brilliant rain, and where each spark touched the oceans and deserts and forests of the earth there rose a man and a woman, naked and full grown; and as they stood for the first time on sun-cast limbs they saw one another, and were filled with desire and fell at once back to the earth in copulation; and from each union were born two more children of the sun, brother and sister, who emerged from the wombs of their mothers full grown and rich with lust so that they too fell upon one another, brother with sister, mother with son, father with daughter …’

Lin Feyn skimmed ahead. Prurient prose exalting incest perhaps merited the author’s execution, but surely not an entire order of sorcerous assassins dedicated to its eradication.

‘… and the shards of the moon fell in the night like silver snow, taut with sorceries of transformation; but the children of the moon did not sprout and teem and swarm in hordes like the seed of the sun, but waited dormant, yet bright was their allure so that the children of the sun might pick them up and give them form of flesh and bone, for always was it that the moon cannot shine without the sun, and yet the moon owns both night and day. And the children of the earth grew from stones, many in number and many in form, changers of shape and substance, while each star in the sky gave forth a single ray of its light, and some came to the earth and some did not, and some are seen coming still, blazing lines of star fire through the sky. For the power of the sun is motion and fire and irrepressible life, and the power of the moon is transformation and change and seduction and the hiding of things, and the power of the earth is mastery of shape and substance and strength, while the power of the stars is divination and time and the unfettering of the past and future from the present …’

Lin Feyn skipped ahead again. The whole book was like this, most of it in a hurried and barely legible hand.

The rocking of the ship changed. They were raising sail.

‘… and the children of all but the moon were many, but the children of the moon remained few and kept their holy essence undiluted as it was given them; and so the children of the moon rose to rule over all, Silver Kings and half-gods of matchless sorcery, each born over and over and yet each always the same, each life raised anew from a sun-child taken in its prime and cast aside, as a new cloak is favoured over an old and then discarded in turn when its threads grow bare and with equally as little thought, while the half-god within remains unchanged. So it is that the half-gods alone remember the origins of time itself and know their creators for what they were …’

The ship was starting to turn, and it was Red Lin Feyn’s personal ritual to stay on deck as she left home on any voyage, and to stand at the stern until she could no longer see the land. She was about to close the book and put it away, but the last words made her pause and then rummage frantically through the papers she’d been given when she was Arbiter, until she found the sheaf of notes on dragons, the claims of Chay-Liang’s slave, the alchemist Bellepheros.

‘Dragons do not die as we do. They live one life after another, and each remembers all those that have passed before. Thus when a dragon hatches from an egg, its flesh may be new and weak, but its soul is already a thousand years old.’

She closed the Rava and hid it away, and went to watch the coast of Khalishtor recede. It nagged at her. The Rava and the alchemist seemed to be saying the same thing, one about long-lost half-gods that had possibly never existed, the other about dragons which very much did. But the half-gods had not been dragons. Even the Rava wasn’t
that
obscure.

The curtains of the storm-dark were shifting more and more these days. The
Servant on Ice
was at sea for weeks before they found the curtain to take them to Aria. When they sighted it, the
Servant
turned and tacked against the wind towards a wall of black cloud from sea to sky that ran as far as the eye could see. Ran for ever, if you tried to find its end as some of the first sailors had done. Violet lightning lit up the cloud from within. As twilight fell and the
Servant
entered, Lin Feyn stood at the prow, and as the lightning cracked about them she wove the enchantments of her father of fathers, Feyn Charin, and drew the lightning to her until it wrapped the ship like an aura. She held it tight, as the cloud and the roaring wind and the violent seas and the lightning abruptly stopped to silence and a pitch-black nothing, as the
Servant
passed into the timeless void of the storm-dark’s heart. Lin Feyn counted out the heartbeats as the lightning-crackle about her ebbed and slipped away. A few more heartbeats with every passing year as the crossing became ever harder. There would come a time, not too many years away, when the navigators one by one would begin to fail, unable to find the strength to hold the Nothing at bay for so long. But not today.

The violence of the sea and the storm crashed back. Lin Feyn loosed the remains of her captured lightning in one thunderous retort and returned, exhausted, to her cabin, and to struggling with the wilful obscurities of the Rava’s prose. Darkness had been falling as they’d entered the storm, but the other side offered up a bright morning sun, becalmed in a cloudless sky. Such was the way of the storm-dark.

The
Servant on Ice
sighted land a few days later. She kept over the horizon from the coast of Aria while men on sleds scouted the shore and waters ahead for other ships. When they were far enough north to close on the coast of the Ice Witch’s black fortress in the night, Lin Feyn took a sled and rode for miles until she saw the dark line of land and the fires of the fortress itself. She loosed a few tiny gold-glass birds, golems casting eyes for traps and warnings, but found nothing. In the darkness she struggled to return to the
Servant
again, and it was almost dawn as she finally set down on its decks. She felt dizzy, and her head swam with fatigue. She stumbled to bed, too exhausted to think, but woke again an hour later to a mayhem of noise, of shouting and thunder and lightning. As she rushed outside a streak of fire shot overhead, punching a hole in the mizzenmast topsail. A flurry of thunderbolts rattled the air, but the fireball was too quick. It flickered sideways and came back again, fizzing past. A second fireball landed on the foredeck and coalesced into the shape of a man ablaze. Burning torrents flew from his fingers, a hose of flame washing the deck. Red Lin Feyn hurled one glass globe and then another, the first a trap that flashed into a glass prison as it hit the flaming man, the second a shield to hold back his torrents. The flaming man burst into dazzling light. Men became pillars of fire and ran screaming around him; more flames shot up the masts and the rigging, biting into rope and sail and wood as though all had been soaked in lamp oil. Lin Feyn clenched her fists. The glass prison tightened around the magician, crushing him smaller until he was a seething knot of sun-bright flame.

‘Stop!’ she howled, ‘or I will end you!’ Her words died in shouts and volleys of lightning as the other fireball shot past. When she looked back her glass prison had vanished and the magician was gone. Sails were burning all across the ship, and most of the rigging too, while sailors ran with buckets, trying to stop the fire from taking the masts. Two galleys were coming at them, closing fast. Rockets whooshed and roared. Bright orange streaks fizzed and hissed across the water leaving trails of smoke in the air as the
Servant
’s rocketeers got their range. Glass globes shattered in clouds of fire as they hit the water. The
Servant
fired a salvo and then another, and the sea around the two galleys erupted in a wall of fire; and then Lin Feyn saw the fireball again amid the flames. It sucked them into itself and came back at her, brighter than before and with infernal speed. It shot through the mainmast and shattered it, punched through a sailor who stood in its path, leaving a gaping charred hole in his chest …

The world juddered. The ship twitched. Suddenly Lin Feyn was below decks with no thought or memory as to how, running for her cabin to destroy her copy of the Rava, Feyn Charin’s journals, the notes from the alchemist on the nature of dragons, all before the fire witch came. She crashed through her door and hurled an explosion of glass at the ship’s side to blow open a hole, then gathered up all the papers she could see. The Rava was back in its hidden compartment, and so she threw everything out of the chest and opened it, and then stopped and looked about in time to see the fireball from above hover by her cabin door. It coalesced into the shape of a woman dressed in brilliant orange silk embroidered with cranes in black silhouette. Lin Feyn dived aside and hurled a glass globe. The woman shifted into fire, darted up and hurled a blast of flames. Lin Feyn conjured a glass shield. With her other hand she scattered marbles across the floor. She held her shield firm and drew back her arm to throw again as the fireball coalesced into a woman once more, flames burning from her fingers. She threw a blast at Lin Feyn’s feet, transformed again to flames, shot sideways, materialised … The marbles Lin Feyn had scattered detonated with bangs and flashes … hundreds of whirling glass blades shot into the air in a blur …

Time stopped. Flames paused mid-flicker. Her glass blades hung still. The roar of fire, the thunder and lightning from above, all fell away, silenced and mute. Everything froze as Red Lin Feyn looked on. She had the sense of a woman, achingly beautiful, with a gold circlet on her brow. A place of shimmering rainbows and …

The woman spoke in Red Lin Feyn’s thoughts:
You are dreaming, sorceress. Come and sit with me a while.

The
Servant on Ice
was gone. She was in a dark room in some other ship on a sea so still she could barely feel its rocking swell. Her head throbbed. She was thirsty and had terrible cramps in her stomach. The clothes she wore were unfamiliar, a slave’s silk tunic, belted at the waist, and nothing else. Her glass had gone, all her sleeves and pockets. Her wrists and ankles were bound.

A shadow slid across the room, a shadow without light nor any flesh-and-blood body to birth it. It slipped under the crack of the door and was gone …

Come closer.

Again the world lurched and flickered. Now she was in a room of polished white stone, round, somewhere high in a breeze where the air was fresh and cold. Archways opened to the sky, north, south, east and west. Sunlight streamed through. Between the openings were more arches, blank plain things. They made her think of Baros Tsen’s eyrie. Dreams were like that, weren’t they?

Her legs were unsteady. She was in the same slave’s tunic as before, but now her hands and feet were free. She couldn’t see anyone, but she knew she wasn’t alone.

‘Come outside.’ A woman’s voice, soft and melodious. Red Lin Feyn took a deep breath and summoned a snip of the storm-dark into each hand. She looked at them and wondered how such a thing was possible, and then remembered that she was in a dream. Fearless then, she walked out to a balcony atop a slender white tower. Four other towers stood about her, all arranged in a circle. A city spread beneath them, and a great river ran beside it, as wide as the city itself and a-swarm with ships and barges. The streets were full of life and motion. Sounds wafted on the air, merchants selling their wares, the singing of street-corner bards, criers shouting news and imperial edicts, the clatter of horses, the distant blare of cavalry horns. The stink came too.